this post was submitted on 02 May 2025
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xkcd

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Title text:

Unstoppable force-carrying particles can't interact with immovable matter by definition.

Transcript:

[An arrow pointing to the right and a trapezoid are labeled as 'Unstoppable Force' and 'Immovable Object' respectively.]
[The arrow is shown as entering the trapezoid from the left and the part of it in said trapezoid is coloured gray.]
[The arrow is shown as leaving the trapezoid to the right and is coloured black.]
[Caption below the panel:] I don't see why people find this scenario to be tricky.

Source: https://xkcd.com/3084/

explainxkcd for #3084

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago

i think I've made that game engine before.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

Maybe the universe will crash due to division by zero, floating-point error, integer overflow and segmentation fault, all of them occurring simultaneously. The objects will experience infinite velocity and infinite forces, there will be rounding errors, the system will run out of RAM and storage space. The universal CPU will max out all threads, and run out of cooling capacity. The hardware catches fire, the entire universe immediately collapses into a singularity, resulting in a new big bang as the system reboots. Oh, and the log files are corrupted, so good luck troubleshooting that one.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

A popup will appear asking you to buy the "Extended Physics" DLC

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

First billion years free. After that it’s 17.99 per millennia.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What currency?

I doubt the universe accepts Euro or whatever.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

It's just 17.99. Take it or leave it.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Noooooo! You're violating my binary thinking! Either A or B has to win!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Dammit I should have posted my exact same solution back when I thought of it for the first time, but I was lazy so eh my fuck up

[–] [email protected] 60 points 2 days ago (5 children)

Facepalm Man i'm dumb, this is a great answer to that thought experiment.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago
[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Pretty sure none of these exist so idk why it bothered any1 in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

if people only bothered to think about things that exist (especially things that they think exist) we would probably go the way of the dodo. funnily enough that would prevent the dodos from going that way but whatever.

I highly recommend watching the Vsauce video on supertasks—it's a great video as expected from Vsauce but also ends on a great note about people and their tendency to think about things like this.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

There are some pretty close physical analogs that are fun to think about. You cant move a black hole by exerting physical force on it in the normal way so practically infinite gravity wells are like a immovable "object", though if you're sufficently nerdy enough you can cook some fun ways to harness its gravitational rotation into a kind of engine, or throw another black hole at it to create a big explosion and some gravitational waves which are like a kind of unstoppable force moving at the speed of light.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Relevant username

You can attract a black hole using gravity tho

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

You clearly haven't met my mother.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Is the an unstoppable force or an immovable object or a little bit of both?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 19 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

Neutrinos are pretty close to an unstoppable force: they can pass right through the earth without being stopped.

I believe this is an expectation of dark matter, to being even closer to an unstoppable force. Perhaps a reason we haven’t found it yet would a because we don’t have a detector that can stop it

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

These kinds of contradicitons exist in man made structures, such as laws, rules and regulations. In situations like that, a judge has to pick which rule to follow and which one to ignore. The first time that happens, it becomes the standard solution (precedent) for those kinds of problems.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 days ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 64 points 2 days ago (8 children)

The expression as I heard included "an irresistible force."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago

"And irresistible is what I am, baby!"

[–] [email protected] 84 points 2 days ago (2 children)

That's on the nsfw version of xkcd

[–] [email protected] 46 points 2 days ago
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (19 children)

so if god creates rock so heavy that it can't lift it, its hand just passes through the rock? makes sense.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago (6 children)

A rock so heavy you cannot lift it is not an immovable object. Just cause you are weak does not mean you are right.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (6 children)

I think if God creates a rock so heavy he can't lift it, it's probably a black hole. By definition we can't know what happens inside a black hole, because no information escapes the event horizon. As it's now consistent with known physics that we can't know many aspects of this interaction between God and the black hole, I think this paradox is basically solved. We don't know any more about the interaction, but it's no longer a paradox, it's consistent with physics.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 days ago (1 children)

"What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?" that image doesn't show a force meeting an object

[–] [email protected] 129 points 2 days ago (6 children)

They met, they just didn’t interact. Kinda like me at a work party.

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